Age of Information: A Two-Sensor Status Update System Monitoring The Same Process
Tianqing Yang, Zhengchuan Chen, Howard H. Yang, Min Wang, Yunjian Jia, and Tony Q. S. Quek

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the average age of information in a two-sensor monitoring system, modeling it as parallel queues and deriving formulas for AoI, which helps understand how redundant sensors affect information freshness.
Contribution
It introduces a stochastic hybrid system approach to analyze AoI in a two-sensor system, providing a closed-form solution for symmetric sensor parameters.
Findings
Validated the theoretical AoI formulas with numerical results.
Demonstrated that redundant sensors can improve information freshness.
Provided a general analytical framework for AoI in multi-sensor systems.
Abstract
This work studies the average age of information (AoI) of a monitoring system in which two sensors are sensing the same physical process and update status to a common monitor using their dedicated channels. Generally, using redundant devices to update the status of a process can improve the information timeliness at the monitor, but the disordered arrivals of updates also make the AoI analysis challenging. To that end, we model the system as two M/M/1/1 parallel status updating queues. By leveraging tools from stochastic hybrid system (SHS), we provide a general approach to analyze the average AoI, whereas a closed-form expression can be obtained when the status arrival rates and/or the service rates are the same for the two sensors. Numerical results validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAge of Information Optimization · IoT Networks and Protocols
